Here and now, voting is futile. Your vote doesn’t count, at least not for anything that you believe in and want done. Your vote is only an endorsement of an illegitimate system that persistently and viciously works against all of your interests.

This political machinery cannot serve you, since its funders, its masters, are the banks and corporations that demand the cheapest possible labor, and profits by any means necessary, with no regards for human rights, their host communities or the environment. With your negligible salary, unemployment checks, welfare or food stamps, you simply don’t count. You don’t matter. Just as you may find street beggars annoying, your government sees you only as a nuisance, to be tranquilized with lies on television. If it could, it would deport you wholesale to Chinese sweat shops, and trumpet it as “The Right to Work Overseas Act.”

As they eviscerate you, they flood your intellect and conscience with endless bilge, while charging you a monthly subscription for your own drowning, even. Today’s urgent items for discussion, “Gold Medalist’s Postworkout Foods,” “Bad Jeans Styles for Guys” and “Cyrus Shaves Her Hair.” Do ponder these while your house is taken away, your car is dispossessed, your crops wilt and the sea rises to your ankles, and higher.

Televised sports and amateur talent contests, American Idol, America’s Got Talent, X Factor, The Voice, So You Think You Can Dance, etc., try to convince Americans that life is still fair, that one would get ahead if only one could leap, sing, dance or reverse slam dunk better than one’s neighbors, but these pipe dreams of fame and fortune cannot disguise the fact that, for ordinary Americans, even the most lowly aspirations are becoming out of reach. A college graduate rolling burritos for Taco Bell will not move out of his mom’s garage, anytime soon or ever, by simply learning how to break dance, or wail like Otis Redding.

Your government wants rah-rah, cartoony subjects, not fully realized and conscious citizens, ones who know their history and rights, so the more American you are, in fact, the more superfluous you become to your illegitimate rulers, since, again, they don’t want thinking, responsible citizens, with Constitutionally-guaranteed rights, but only bodies, meat packages, to slave and to fight their many wars, and that’s why politicians of both parties will continue to usher in illegals to take your jobs, since they don’t have full rights, they keep wages impossibly low, and they distract you from seeing your real enemy, which is the military-banking complex and their lackeys, your government. With the world becoming increasingly desperate, largely thanks to American wars and financial manipulations, there is no shortage of cheap laborers willing to undercut even the lowest wages out there, so even immigrants will have their jobs taken by more recent, and more desperate, arrivals, many of them refugees escaping American drones and bombs. In a finite world of rapidly dwindling resources, starving, willing-to-work-for-anything workers will be the last abundant commodity.

Corporate bosses want maximum profits, naturally, which means maximum exploitation of workers, and since your politicians serve these corporate mafiosi, they must do all that they can to ensure your destitution. To do their jobs well, they must work against you. A recent headline from Business Insider, “Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High, Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low,” and it’s all by design, naturally.

Keenly aware that Americans can’t stay docile forever, that sooner or later they will react to their rising impotence and plummeting standards of living, the government is nevertheless doing nothing to improve the situation. It is, however, putting all the legal and logistical apparatus into place to suppress, hard, any eventual explosion of discontent. Our police is becoming militarized, and the military itself is being used in civilian situations. More than a decade into this absurd War on Terror, no Muslim terrorists have appeared in the Homeland other than those propped up, manipulated and framed by the government itself, and yet it is ratcheting up its surveillance and arming itself even further, with machine guns, armored vehicles and futuristic weapons, all to combat you, ordinary citizens, should you decide to wave a fist in the direction of Goldman Sachs or Washington.

So vote only if you want more of this self-destructive madness. Vote only if you want more government suppression, more of your jobs sent overseas, bailouts for huge corporations and tax-funded bonuses for white-collar criminals. Vote only if you want to kill, die and be crippled in your overlords’ wars for profits. Vote if you hate yourselves, citizens. Both political parties consider you a fool when you register, stand in line, sometimes up to six hours, and vote, just to sanction their blatant lies.

During the last Presidential electoral charade, both candidates paused their rhetorical jousting when it came time to stump for the bank bailouts. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, Obama, McCain and Bush, like three stooges of big business, to funnel trillions to the too-big-to-fail banksters.

Oh the shame of it all! As the fraud was crowned, American intellectuals joyfully wept, and some are again campaigning for their sleek savior! Banished to an academic theme park, your average American intellectual is a timid poseur, careerist who’s best at congratulating himself for his feeble, half-baked protest, if he bothers to participate in public life at all. Look, ma, I’m chaining myself to my desk! When there are so many supple co-eds patrolling the halls, it’s hard to keep your postmodern mind on the goddamn Republic.

If an academic fancies himself a progressive or radical, even, then the trick is to adopt a contrarian posture, but without really disturbing anything, since he himself belongs to a ponzi scheme that thrives by colluding with the criminal banks. Like these, his university is also an outfit that profits by misleading borrowers, the students. To maintain his good standing, then, the American academic knows which topics are kosher to discuss, and which to best avoid, such as 9/11, the staged death of Bin Laden or the bogus War on Terror, etc.

Since the system is the problem, it’s time we starve it, first by not voting, but also by refusing to fight its many wars. Go AWOL, soldiers, for you are only destroying many innocent folks, as well as yourselves, by killing and maiming for oil companies, weapon manufacturers and banks. Those blood stains can never be bleached out. As you destroy your souls, at the very least, the fat cats are laughing at you. The medals you wear are badges of criminality, obviously, but also of idiocy, for only a fool risks his life, limbs, honor and conscience to purchase his contemptuous masters new mansions and yachts. As you dishonor yourself and nation, they flatter you with vapid praises, so go AWOL, all soldiers!

In TV commercials, returning soldiers are applauded by strangers as they pass through airports, but I have never witnessed that happen in person, and I’ve seen countless American grunts in many American airports, from Boston to Honolulu, in the last ten years. In Chicago, a panhandler showed me his discharge paper to prove that he was a vet. He said he had been in Iraq. Wanting to hear more, I offered to buy this Texan a beer, but he declined, saying drinking would only piss him off. He nearly teared up just talking to me, “People don’t even want to look at you, man. They don’t give a shit what you’ve gone through.” Well, most of them don’t, that’s for sure, and why is that a surprise? Agreeing with me that soldiers for oil wars are basically suckers, a Philly bar patron pointed out the obvious, “Every society uses its young men to fight its wars. Between 18 and 25, they’re aggressive and can be trained to kill. After that, they’ll start to think!”

There are those who reason that the right to vote has been so hard-earned, that it cannot be shirked, but when the entire electoral process has been thoroughly perverted and rigged, when cheating often occurs right out in the open, then it is our duty as citizens to boycott such a sick farce. A refusal to vote, then, becomes an indictment of the system itself, with the lower the turnout, the louder the accusation to the world, and posterity, that this system is fraudulent. What if they staged an election and no one came? No one but suckers and fools who were programmed to chew on empty slogans, that is. So will we be idiots, yet again, this November? Or will we respect ourselves by calling out these sneering imposters who have hijacked our country? Let’s collectively expose and discredit them.

Don’t vote, don’t fight, go on strike! It’s time.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.